LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE. Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.

June 11

Many of you have joined us from the Steam Summer Sale - happy zailing!

NEW CONTENT

A snippet of cannibal-centric content reveals a little more about the Chapel of Lights, the Smiling Priest's faith, and where all those candles come from. It raises as many questions as it answers; and it doesn't end well.

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Reviews

“Sunless Sea's method of storytelling isn't unique, but it has never been realised with such impact and elegance.”
10/10 – Eurogamer

“Absolutely the best writing in any video game since, well, as long as I can remember.”
10/10 – PCGamesN

“a very compelling and satisfying adventure... The realm of possibilities seems endless, and every time I set sail I find something new.”
9/10 – Destructoid

About This Game

LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE.

Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.

If the giant crabs, sentient icebergs and swarms of bats don’t get you, madness and cannibalism certainly will. But that old black ocean beckons, and there’s loot for the brave souls who dare to sail her.

Your captain will die. But you can pass on resources from one generation to the next. Acquire a family home and a hoard of heirlooms. Build up your own story across generations of zailors who braved the sea and lost - or won...

My crew attempted a mutiny, upset and frightened from being out at sea for too long. When their mutiny failed, I sailed them back to London. Once home was in sight, and they gathered at the rails to sing praise, I promptly turned the ship around and sailed it in a circle. And then another circle, this one wider. Then, a third circle, this one smaller.

No one commits mutiny on my vessel.

Time moved swiftly as the circles continued. My crew only had a faint understanding of what punishments were in store for them as I spent the night in my cabin, fornicating with our surgeon. Around and around and around we sailed.

It soon dawned on them what was happening when the nightmares came, when the food and supplies began running low. Once the food was gone, the madness came quick; the frightened tears, quicker. One member wanted to kill herself, but I wouldn't allow it. Another begged me to stop the endless circles, so I sailed them faster, sloppier. Once, I sailed close to a zee-beast. It swam away, wanting no part in the theatre of suffering I was producing. An entire meal, the crew's last hope of staving off death by starvation, had gone. Only the circles remained.

If they wanted to live, they had to eat. Keeping their humanity was no longer an option. They knew what little choice they had, and what little they could do to control it. Out of food, cannibalism quickly took hold on the decks. Crew members butchered and ate each other after yet another failed mutiny. And back in my cabin, all I could do was muse with my sultry lady in lilac, the crewmembers' wails of grief a very, very potent aphrodisiac for more fornication.

We sailed, ate, sailed again. The rhythm never broke. A circle without end.

Soon I took part in the feasting of a brazen zailor who tried to shoot me and failed spectacularly in doing so. The few remaining crew and I ate him and we said nothing of the incident. They knew better. The silence was terrible for them, and it pleased me. Nearby, a cargo vessel sailed past us without pause. You could almost smell the bounty of food and fuel aboard it. They never knew what we were doing, or what we've become, circling without end. Then, they were gone, and my remaining crew came undone.

I shot a crewman who attempted to abandon ship, and I tossed his body overboard. I did nothing as another member leapt overboard soon after, only to be swallowed by the waves, screaming about Salt's curse being set upon us. I dined with the lady in lilac again as the second to last crewman wept and succumbed in his sleep to nightmares, alone and misbegotten.

I believe his corpse is still decomposing in its spot, somewhere in the dark in the lowest corner of my vessel, the Unsinkable II. He shall remain there as a souvenir until I see fit.

Finally, when it was just me and one broken crew member left, I turned the ship portside and set us off. Time to stop the circles; home was near, just at the edge of the screen. I paid a hefty fee for a tow and returned to port, to my zeeside mansion, where I slept like a baby that evening.

London was oblivious. Or unmoved.

Tomorrow, thirteen new crew members await orders to set sail. They haven't the foggiest of what to expect.

The Pirates laughed.They laughed as they sunk my ship. None but I were alive on that ship. I sunk into the depths for the second time. That is when I swore that I would have my vengeance. I was no longer Promthelius - a dapper chap of Fallen London.I was Ahab - and this game; my great white whale.

I started from scrap. I had nothing but a ship and a gun. I started trading Sphinxstones. I brought them to London for a nominal fee. It was not living, but surviving. Pirates swarmed my trade-route. I tried to avoid them for a time, but my ship would not take me further with the holes in it's hull. It slowed to a crawl, and five Pirate-ships sank me with an impressive display of teamwork for a bunch of thieves. I heard the laughter as I sank into those obsidian depths below. Was this how it ended? Was this how Ahab would be remembered?

No.

I would not succumb there. I was Ahab. I was the reckoning of Promthelius. I was two generations of seething disdain for this world, and all that inhabited it.

I started again. I threw caution to the wind, and traded wildly. With naught but two hundered echoes and two barrels of fuel, I found the Salt Lions. I once more started trading in sphinxstones.Pirates swarmed, but I mostly avoided them. They laughted, jeering and taunting me. Was I a Coward? Perhaps.

I traded sphinxstones until the Salt Lions ran out. And thus began one year of sunshine. I traded empty boxes of mirrors in the city of Khan's Shadow, and captured the sunshine from the Neath in droves as I emerged there from the Cumaean canal. Three boxes turned into six. Six turned into sixteen. I bought a new ship - a trading vessel with one hundered and twenty units of cargo-space. My Empire of sunshine on that opaque expanse.

My plan was not without fault. Pirates tried and failed to sink me. I faced much danger upon those waters. Men and women so uncouth and guileful that they should like to rob me were swarming those waters. But with purpose, I sank or avoided all that followed.

In the end, ninety boxes of sunshine at each time was delivered to the Isle of Cats. I netted tidy sums of money. The Isle of Cats was a sun upon my obsidian empire. But the age of sun could not last. My last run ended in roaring success. Sixty thousand echoes filled my vault.

Once back in London, I had only one purpose.With my money, I bought an Eschatologue-class Dreadnaught, and all the battle-gear that Fallen London had to offer.It was expensive, but vengeance is a dish best served with overwhelming firepower.

And through my cannons, upon the deck of that Dreadnaught, my justice had finally come. I ended the reign of Pirates in a single day. Unfinished revolutionaries, Pirate Steamers, Republic Dreadnaughts and Glorious Dreadnaughts. It made no difference. All were sunk. All plunged to the depths under the sound of my cannons. Some say that they can still hear me laughing. There are no Pirates upon these waters, Friends. Only death.

I am Ahab. And I have taken my great white whale. My vengeance is complete.

The biggest disappointment with this game is the thing that I see praised endlessly in the positive reviews - the writing and stories. Yes, the writing is pretty good and yes the stories are interesting. The problem is that they are only good and interesting the first time you read them. The true horror of this world hit me on my third captain when I realized that nothing was ever going to change. You come to realize that everything is always the same, and nothing varies. Get port reports for the Admiralty, with the same cute flavor-text repeated ad-nauseum. Go ashore to repeat one of the exact same 1-3 random events every time. Go to sea and realize that the exact same monsters will continuously appear in the the exact same positions forever. Recruit the same paltry handful of officers, with the exact same stories, resolved the exact same way every time. And then you can go the really stand-out islands with in-depth stories and mysteries, only to again realize that these are played out in five minutes through random-chance screen-prompts with maybe two or three alternate paths. In about 30 hours (as of this writing) I really feel like I've seen pretty much every single thing it has to offer. And this is simply unforgivable for a game that sells itself on the fact that you will die.

Based on that, I expected that characters would change and cycle. That only a few officers would be available to any one captain. That entire islands would disappear from the zee, and whole new ones would appear. That Fallen London would be teeming with traders, demons, nobles, thieves, naval officers, etc who would constantly change out and be replaced. That the trade goods and prices would change and your new captain would be forced to again explore and seek out the best suppliers and the best buyers. Areas you previously considered "safe" would now be home to vicious beasts. Basically, that playing as a new captain would feel rewarding and new. That's the sad part. It isn't. Nothing ever changes. Considering that the game is basically all text and random chance prompts, there should have been hundreds, if not thousands of stories and events that you could potentially see. There's really no excuse for how utterly static the world is.

That might be something you could ignore (though not forgive) if the game was fun to play, but it's not. Trading is so utterly pointless I don't understand why they even bothered adding items to the game. You will never be able to make more than three Echo per commodity, and you'll inevitably have to spend that profit plus an additional markup to replace the food and fuel you used to trade those goods in the first place. Exploration is a complete crapshoot because more often than not finding something valuable will require you to pass a skill check and you will never have enough skill points to have even a decent chance. When it comes to fighting monsters, just get to the edge of them, flip the boat in reverse, and then keep blasting the engines as you shoot them. You'll basically never be hit again.

I will say, just like everyone else, that the music is excellent and the atmosphere was very intriguing while it lasted. That is not enough. If you still find yourself interested, then please play the browser game instead. It's free, and it has a lot more content than you will find here.

Ultimately Sunless Sea is a potentially amazing game if you like rich narrative worlds and don't mind reading a lot . . . but you should either wait a bit after release and/or take long breaks between when you play because it's not where it needs to be yet.

Why?

Because of the way the game is being developed. Failbetter Game's previous effort, Fallen London (which this game shares the same universe with) has grown massively over time, and so has Sunless Sea. But right now shortly after release, Sunless Sea is a bit sparse. And it's got a lot of issues that need resolving.

The first big issue is the combat, which is very basic at the moment. It works, and it's exciting and dangerous at first, but once you play for a while it becomes very dull and simple save for a few specific "boss" monsters, and even then it's just simple and dangerous. A lot of new AI and balancing is going to be needed before it gets interesting.

Another big issue is size and speed. Your starter ship is almost unbearably slow and at first the world seems vast, but once you get past the (HUGE) initial difficulty wall, upgrading to better ships and engines with a fully explored map reveals that the world actually isn't all that large. More a lake than a sea. Honestly, the game would be better served if the map size were scaled up 15% and all of the engines moved about 10% faster than they currently do. Then at least you'd feel like you were moving, and the world would feel a appropriately large.

The next (and really the biggest) issue is replayability. The game offers a lot of good story content in it, and this content is fixed. However the world is intentionally very harsh and you're bound to die a lot early on thanks to that big initial difficulty wall. These two facts result in a major problem where the narrative content ends up directly at odds with the death and respawn "legacy" mechanics.

Namely: you're going to end up re-reading (more likely skipping through) lots of stuff you've already read before. Finding out about a character's past or an island's secret is really cool the first time, finding out about it the fifth time? No so much. There is currently no mechanic - and certainly not enough content - in place so that the different lives you start encounter notably different story experiences in the game, which would be the obvious solution to this problem.

However, looking at how Fallen London has grown, and some of the systems already in place in Sunless Sea, I feel it's safe to assume that as time goes on more stories and content are going to continually get added in. There's already a pretty big expansion planned, and been a steady drip of new stories over the last month. They even just added a new alternate method to end your current game, so it's not like these are minor updates.

Essentially, what you're likely to not realize (I certainly didn't) when buying Sunless Sea is that this is more a single player MMO that's half Naval Elite/Sid Meier's Pirates and half Victorian/Lovecraftian Adventure gaming. Knowing that is probably more key to whether or not you should purchase it than anything.

This game is currently strong, but threadbare after you spend some time with it. In a few months? I'm guessing it's going to feel much fuller and robust. In a year? It might actually live up to the immense potential it has.

Take that as you will, and certainly, if you're not the type to trust that a game will reach it's full potential in time or don't like that development model, hold off. But I'd encourage you to check back later when it's gotten a bunch of new content.

For myself, I've found more than enough so far to justify the purchase, and have enjoyed the vast majority of my time with the game. The promise of more to come is just a bonus.

After sailing around for an hour or so, killing some huge crabs and collecting some reports from new islands I had discovered, I was running low on fuel and supplies. The game reminded me of this with a prompt titled "Desperate Measures," so I was left with little choices on the matter.

I tried to use my last two boxes of supplies in a vain attempt to desperately scrape together some fuel so I could reach the port of Fallen London -- I failed. Now I was faced with the problem of starvation, on top of the whole fuel fiasco.

Fear was setting in, as was hunger, fuel was low, as was hope, so I decided to beseech the gods of the Unter-Zee for help, and help they did. I was, for lack of a better word, teleported to some kind of temple dedicated to the gods, and that was where things went from bad to worse.

This temple couldn't be further away from Fallen London, and therefore aid, than I could have gotten on my own. So I decided to beseech the gods again, this time my pleading went unanswered, a cruel cold-shoulder delivered to an ingrateful neophyte. The only purpose my inane begging to a higher power served was to unsettle my crew and drive us all to the brink of sanity.